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S3 14XPO Round Up

S3 hosted their 7th annual XPO at The Brewery. The day featured panel sessions and vendor presentations covering diverse topics from Hyper-V specific storage solutions to data classification and discovery engines. The big topics of the day were the evolution of software in the data centre and how EMC has made the Software Defined Data Centre (SDDC for short) a reality with the ViPR product line.

It is clear that we are starting to see more and more storage products being delivered as a software only solution. Quantum with their DXi virtual appliance, EMC with ScaleIO and VMware with their Storage Appliance. The days of hardware lock-in are slowly being eroded.

The Flash based storage panel session promoted some lively debate with Tintri, EMC and Tegile offering their opinions of Flash based technologies and how they integrate in customer environments. With such an explosion of Flash based storage arrays, it certainly is a mine field.

Of course an S3 XPO is not all work and no play – with 20 stands in the vendor market place, there was plenty of time to explore the products and solutions on offer, enter the odd competition, and catch up with industry peers.

To help lubricate the conversation, The Brewery provided some interesting real ale, purely for tasting you understand, with a challenge to see if anyone could identify them – showing my lazy appreciation for bottled lager I didn’t manage to get even one right.

As the host for the day I thought it was a very interesting and informative day and we actually managed to keep to the schedule, testament to the professionalism of the S3 team and the host (of course).

If you were unable to attend don’t worry, S3 have a packed event calendar so you’ll surely get invited to another. “But what about S3 15XPO” I hear you cry… The S3 event team are already planning for next year so watch this space.